The estimation of the load of a network is an important aspect of LTE, and is relevant in the context of admission control, congestion control, and load balancing. The disclosure is particularly, though not necessarily exclusively, relevant to load estimation and load management in a network comprising basestations in a small cell, or femtocell basestations.
Load management is an important aspect for consideration in a wireless network. If the load of a network is not managed properly (for example, where there are too many user equipments (UEs) in a cell), the quality of service (QoS) experienced by the UEs connected to that network will be poor because many UEs would be forced to share limited resources. The system could manage this by allowing only a small number of UEs to be admitted to the network so that each UE experiences a good quality of service. However, this would result in the network being under-utilised. It is thus important to effectively estimate and manage the load of the system.
In this respect, one key issue to be addressed is the accurate estimation of the load of a particular cell. The simplest way to estimate the load of a cell is to count the number of UEs in the system. This approach roughly reflects the level of input traffic admitted by the system. In particular, a cell that has a higher number of UEs will be supporting a higher load. However, this estimation does not take into account system resource or quality of service requirements. For example, the estimation does not take into account the fact that UEs with relaxed quality of service requirements may occupy fewer system resources than those with more stringent requirements. The estimate is thus not particularly accurate.